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I went to Mac Store to drool over Retina display MacBook Pro and toyed around with OS X as necessary. Formerly when I used KDE, OS X always seemed miraculously intuitive and well thought out desktop, but now after spenging weeks with GNOME 3 it no longer had that kind of effect. I founf myself confused and wondering about some of the simplest things: how do I start launch, what button to press to see all applications and why the open windows do not snap to side of the screen. While GNOME3 took tons of design cues from OS X, I have to admit their team managed to produce something better. In OS X you have to press separate buttons (or button combinations) for search, to view open windows and to manage virtual desktops ("Spaces"). In GNOME3 all those functions are behind single button push and at a glance. Sure GNOME3 has it's fair share of weird design decisions, but I'm rather certain they will be fixed in near future. For example, when maximizing window, the title bar remains there for no good reason. However, this can be fixed by adding one argument and modifying other. The functionality is there, so just a matter of time before someone implements graphical way to setup it, possibly at some point this will be default. At least it should be!

As a former KDE fanatic/evangelist I am not pained at all to admit that the KDE SC project isn't really going nowhere, but for GNOME3 things are different. In fact, should someone make a cool looking computer with stable BSD or Linux system with GNOME3 running on it coupled with stable API & ABI and good font rendering (all three something unheard of in linux distros), I have no doubts about its success. Hell, for iMac look-alike running system like that with better expandability and GNOME3, I'd be willing to shell out more money than for a iMac. That's how good GNOME 3 really is. And I'm still running version 3.2, while the latest is 3.4.

2013 Year Of Linux Desktop - I want to believe.

After taking a testdrive with Mageia (unpolished beta mess) & Windows 7 (too slow for mah lappy) in order to get rid of my 4 year old XP Pro install for good (it had three rootkits gg), I yielded once again and returned to the distro which I have deep love/hate relationship: openSUSE. This time instead of spending days to configure KDE (horrible mess), I decided to give a spin to GNOME 3 again. GNOME 3.0 was utter shit and completely unusable, but I've heard good about latter iterations marked as "stable", openSUSE 12.1 coming with GNOME 3.2. After installing from live USB-stick and so forth I was greeted with nice desktop where everything kinda just worked. Then I took a deeper look.

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